A digital, shared-screen tabletop game for up to four players, designed as an interactive ecological communication tool. Players cooperate as migrating birds navigating a city of glass, weather and hidden dangers — learning about bird-window collisions not through text, but through what the game asks them to do: applying mitigation strategies, observing outcomes, collecting reports.
The design is grounded in three frameworks from interactive-learning research — stealth learning, procedural rhetoric and peer-to-peer cooperation. A comparative study against an educational video showed substantially stronger engagement and meaningfully higher real-world action intent, supporting the hypothesis that an argument made through rules can be more effective than the same argument stated as text.
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Reflection
Urban Feather is the project where my vision came into clearest focus. I have always believed that the goal of design is not just to remove friction, but to create experiences that are inherently rewarding — driven by mastery, autonomy and connection rather than points and badges layered on top. This project let me test that belief directly: instead of rewarding players with scores for "learning correctly," I built a game where understanding emerges from cooperation, meaningful choices, and the satisfaction of seeing a strategy work. The comparative study became my way of asking whether that conviction actually holds — and the result, that players became more willing to act in the real world, told me it does.
It also confirmed the kind of designer I want to be: one who can carry an idea all the way from research and behavioral theory to a fully built, playable system, rather than stopping at a concept. Working alone in Unity across two quartiles was demanding, but it taught me that I am most engaged when I am both designing the experience and shaping how it actually works. Going forward, I want to keep designing technology that meets people where they are and turns care into action — whether the medium is a game, an AI tool, or something I haven't tried yet.